The Tom Lee Memorial

Tom Lee Park, on the Memphis riverfront, is named for a man who saved 32 people from the Mississippi without being able to swim. On May 8, 1925, the M.E. Norman, an Army Corps of Engineers sternwheeler carrying engineers and their families, capsized near Cow Island Bend, about fifteen miles below the city, with about 75 people aboard. Tom Lee, a Black river worker, was bringing a 28-foot motorboat called Zev back upstream after taking his boss to Helena, Arkansas. He saw the Norman go over at 4:50 in the afternoon, made five trips through the current, pulled 32 people out, and stayed all night searching for more. Twenty-three died. President Coolidge received him at the White House, and the Engineers Club raised money for a house at 923 North Mansfield Street. The city gave him a job in its sanitation department at about twenty cents an hour. He stayed about twenty years, retiring in 1948 on nearly double the usual pension. Lee died on April 1, 1952. The next year Memphis renamed its riverfront park for him, and in 1954 it put up an obelisk whose inscription called him a very worthy Negro. Storms brought the obelisk down, and the last of it was removed in 2022. A bronze by David Alan Clark, showing him reaching for a survivor from the boat, followed in 2006, and it stayed when the park was rebuilt in a $60 million redesign that reopened in September 2023. The site of the wreck is unmarked.